Empire State College’s Ian Reifowitz has a post on Daily Kos called “Test prep kills learning. But standardized testing is big money. Guess how this one turns out.” He writes: Here’s what it comes down to: If preparing for and taking the tests means taking kids away from real learning for a significant chunk of the…
All nations, and this seems especially true of great nations, have paradoxes at the core of their national characters that define them. The tensions within these paradoxes are alternately, or in times of crisis simultaneously, a dynamic source of national strength and also an anarchic source of national turmoil. In the United States, these paradoxes…
At the end of the 2013-2014 academic year, total outstanding student debt in the United States is estimated to be $1.08 trillion. About.com, which is quoting information provided in U.S. Treasury reports [http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/moneymatters/ss/How-Much-US-Debt-Does-China-Own.htm], provides the following overview of who holds U.S. government debt: “About 32 cents for every dollar of U.S. debt, or $4.6 trillion,…
Thank You. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. Thank you. Everyone, please have a seat. Have a seat. Before I get started, can we get the new presidential set up out here? It has worked before. That is more like it. It is great to be back. What a year, huh? I usually…
One of the things the assessment gurus of corporate-style education don’t like is the idea of professors in complete control of the curriculum and pedagogy in their own classrooms. They want everyone “to be on the same page,” feeling that education has no value unless done in unison. This is the thinking behind most cries…
The Occupy Movement has been the first major grassroots progressive movement in the United States in decades. But, at its core, the appeal of the Occupy Wall Street movement has been that it is politically unaffiliated, and that lack of structure, or, more precisely, that lack of structural purpose, has also been its undoing. Occupy…
I have been thinking a great deal about John Ziker and his coleagues’ detailed study of the work that we, as faculty members, do, and I think that their study supports, directly or at least conceptually, most of the following observations: 1. We work very hard—much harder than most people realize and, in most cases,…
Tonight, President Obama will be attending the White House Correspondents Dinner for the sixth time during his presidency. Below are links to the transcripts of his remarks at the first five dinners. I think that they are of interest for several reasons. First, he does this sort of thing better than any president—if not in history,…
Henry Giroux, in his new Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education, credits the phrase of the title here to sixties radicals. I don’t remember it myself, but it certainly fits the time. College students were feeling empowered even as they were under attack; colleges and universities were places for change, for innovation, and the students felt…
Yesterday, the White House issued this proclamation: “On Loyalty Day, we renew our conviction to the principles of liberty, equality, and justice under the law. We accept our responsibilities to one another. And we remember that our differences pale in comparison to the strength of the bonds that hold together the most diverse Nation on…